


Like father, like son

by jetbradley



Category: Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types, Tron 2.0
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Jet and his dad talk about their problems and care about each other au, Mentions of Past Emotional Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:09:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27775123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jetbradley/pseuds/jetbradley
Summary: Jet wants to come out to his dad. He knows he's bisexual, he knows his dad is probably also bisexual, and he's known both of these things for years. His dad has no reason to do anything but support him... but nothing is ever that easy, is it?
Relationships: Alan Bradley & Jethro "Jet" Bradley, Jethro "Jet" Bradley & Edward Dillinger Jr., Jethro "Jet" Bradley & Sam Flynn, Sam Flynn & Edward Dillinger Jr.
Comments: 21
Kudos: 14





	1. Chapter 1

“What do you mean you’ve never told him?”  


“I just- I just don’t talk to my dad about that kind of stuff.”  


It was another afternoon where somehow, Ed and Jet had ended up at Sam’s place. Ed and Sam hadn’t always gotten along, but since acquiring Encom, Sam realized he had to get help from someone with the business side of things, and Ed was the only person his age he could begin to ask for help. As for Jet, he was pretty sure he was just another mouth to bounce ideas off of, but Sam had texted him around lunchtime that he was welcome to come over if he wanted, and being with Sam and Ed definitely beat the office.  


Lately, though, despite being in a room with two other fine programmers, Jet was the only person doing any programming. Though he’d eventually caved into a better paycheck and moving up a few rungs in the corporate ladder, unlike his counterparts, he was determined to stay in a position where he was working with games first and foremost. So he’d found himself sitting on the couch with his laptop while his businessman friends puzzled over whatever it was CEO’s even did at Sam’s table.  


He wasn’t even looking at them, and he could sense how Sam didn’t bother to lift his head either when he spoke. “Jet. You can’t be telling me you seriously think Alan would tell you off for being bi.”  


“It’s not that! I just! I’ve never talked to him about that kind of stuff! Ever.”  


“And what’s ‘that kind of stuff?’”  


He paused, remembering the few attempts at a date he’d had in college… And whatever had happened between him and Mercury inside the computer system. “I’ve never told him I had a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend.”  


“You never came home excited to tell him you finally had a date?”  


“I mean, you knew me in high school, Sam. You think I had dates back then?” He shot a look across the room. Poor Ed was awkwardly hunched over Sam’s computer, squinting pointedly at a piece of data.  


“I just- look, Jet, I just don’t get it.” He stopped typing and glanced at Jet over his laptop. “We both know he and my dad were a thing. What are you even scared of?”  


“He’s got a point, you know,” Ed said. “I think if I’d told my dad I was gay, I would’ve been out on the street before I could finish my sentence.”  


Jet paused and looked back at his screen. Before he could consider their words, though, Ed processed Sam’s words. “Wait, your dads were gay?”  


Jet gave him a hand-wavy motion as Sam kept talking. “Look. I came out to him in high school, and his response was basically, ‘yeah? Good for you, kid.’ And he told me he’d felt the same way before and that he was glad I told him. And that was it. Done.”  


“Hm.”  


Sam was right. His dad had no reason to shut him down, not when he’d probably been in the same situation as his son before. He’d never told Jet himself that he’d had a thing with Flynn, and to his knowledge, he hadn’t admitted it to Sam, either… but Sam and Jet had been reading between the lines for years when he entered the ENCOM system and found emails between their dads detailing them to be a lot closer than either of them had ever known. Or wanted to know. He’d emailed Sam about it the moment he was out of the system. Hell, he’d even dug the emails out of his code while he was cleaning up the mess that was the computer’s backup copy of him, just in case Sam didn’t believe him. Ever since, he’d been telling himself that if he came out to his dad, he’d have to bring up those emails… But did he?  


He'd been avoiding the conversation for years. Maybe emails were just his latest excuse to keep his dad out of his life. But it had been a long time since high school. He was going to have to tell his dad eventually. Even if he one day married a (human) girl, or never married at all… It was something he’d known about himself for years, now, and it’s not that he didn’t mind his dad not knowing. But it was important enough that he felt like his dad could never begin to know him without it… Even if his dating life was… Of questionable existence.  


The sound of voices from the table startled him out of his moment, and as he returned to reality, he made a decision with himself.  


“I think I’ll consider telling him.”  


The noise stopped, and Ed looked at him. “What? I was asking what kind of pizza toppings you want.”  


“Oh.” A little sheepishly, “They have barbecue chicken?”  


Sam made a face, but clicked something. “Beats Hawaiian.”  


Ed crossed his arms. “I told you I’d eat your pineapple!”  


“Of course you’d eat the pineapple, you fucking fruit.”  


Jet made an absolutely inhuman noise at that. The screech that came out of Ed’s mouth wasn’t much better as he collapsed onto the table, head under his arms.


	2. Chapter 2

_What do you mean you still haven’t told him? It’s been two weeks!  
_

Jet couldn’t help but roll his eyes when he saw the notification from Sam pop up. Glancing over his shoulder to make sure his boss wasn’t eyeing him, he slid up the screen over his phone keyboard and typed out a reply.  


_I said I’d CONSIDER it.  
_

_What are you even scared of? He’s not gonna kick you out or anything!  
_

_I’m not living with him anymore, that’s not the problem.  
_

Sam replied with a picture of a stick figure labeled “you”, and a dot drawn cartoonishly flying over the stick figure’s head labeled “the point.”  


_Look. I’ve never talked to him about anything like this before. I don’t even know how to go about STARTING that conversation.  
_

_“Hi, Dad, I’m bi” would work.  
_

_It REALLY wouldn’t.  
_

Truth be told, Jet had no idea why he was scared of coming out to his dad. If he was honest with himself, despite the evidence that his sexuality was something he probably shared in common with his dad—despite the fact that Sam had come out to his own dad and been met with nothing but love—there was a voice in Jet’s head that was still telling him that, somehow, his dad would react badly. And it had nothing to do with accusations of snooping through emails while he was inside the world of computers.  


No, it had everything to do with the times he’d reached out to his dad about his code, only to be scolded for not doing his homework. How he could never tell growing up if his dad would be proud of him for what clever code he wrote, or angry with him for not doing something else. And after his run-in with the police, the parental controls his dad set to log him off of his computer at exactly nine every night, without giving him a chance to save his work… losing hours of code, sometimes, _yes, because he forgot to save,_ but it hurt nevertheless. Cutting him off from the only reason he thought he had for living in high school. As an adult? He’d come to terms with it. It’d been almost ten years, and he understood why his dad did what he did to keep Jet focused in any way, shape, or form on his school. But that didn’t make it hurt less as a kid to have his games, the only thing that kept him going, torn down and away from him every time he tried to reach out to his dad, a fellow programmer, about them.  


Maybe it wasn’t rational, that voice in his head, but he was just… too _used_ to rejection to even _consider_ opening up about something this important to him to his Dad.  


Hell, even as an adult, after he’d left Encom and burned through his savings in one of the worst depressive episodes of his life, when he’d needed help the most and his dad finally reached out to him, he’d given up on talking to him and given him a number for his therapist. And it _helped._ It really helped, and Jet was glad he’d listened to his dad’s advice for once. But if he was honest? It still hurt that his dad had given up on trying to help him himself like that. That he thought Jet wouldn’t want to open up him… even if he was right.  


“Talk to someone.”  


_Not me._  


Jet zoned back into the analog world and realized he’d been staring at a for loop for a good ten minutes. He had no idea what it did. Or why he was looking at this file in the first place. Ignoring the file for the moment, he turned to his phone and started writing out a text.  


_Look,  
_

He paused. He had no clue what he was saying, or what he wanted to say. He had a million questions he wanted to ask—how does someone go about coming out to their parents? How does someone even enter the mindset where they’d consider coming out to their parents?—but he didn’t want to bog down Sam’s work with them. Or voice them.  


_Look, I don’t even know how to get started with this. This isn’t a game, I can’t just start designing how I want it to work from the ground up and fix bugs as they come.  
_

_Speaking of games, I have actual work to do. Some of us are still programmers LMAO  
_

_I’m probably gonna google “how to come out to your parents” after work and then try to drown out the fact that I’m too scared to do it with takeout.  
_

_Jet. You’re overthinking it.  
_

_Just tell the man you’re bi.  
_

_You literally don’t need to tell him anything else.  
_

Sam was right. He was overthinking it. Sam had come out to him before and everything had been fine. There was no reason Alan wouldn’t react the same way with him; if anything, it was kind of funny that his dad hadn’t raised a single straight kid, when he thought about it. Every single voice in his head telling him otherwise was saying it based off years of neglect, but… Those were in the past. Way in the past.  


Well, the only way to silence them would be to try to prove them wrong, right?  


_Fine. I’ll try that. But not tonight. Maybe Friday?  
_

_Whatever works. Tell me how it goes  
_

_Rooting for u!  
_

He turned off his phone and grinned to himself. He would come out to his dad. On Friday. In two days. And he was going to do it before he lost that energy about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edited on 7 December 2020 to change Jet's phone to match what I wrote into a possible later addition to this fic.


	3. Chapter 3

Jet did not come out to his dad on Friday. Or the Friday after that. Or even the Friday after that Friday.

No, it was over an _entire month_ before he found himself in his dad’s place, the same one he’d been staying in when he’d been shot into the computer and his life was flipped upside down. The daily temperature had dropped _thirty fucking degrees_ between when he decided to come out to him and when he finally found a time to do it. He wanted to do it in person, but he and his dad just didn’t see each other in person that often, outside of passing each other at work. And he didn’t exactly want his coworkers to see him trying desperately to form any meaningful connection with his Dad through the only similarity they had that hadn’t been ruined between them yet. So he’d waited until one night when Alan invited him over for dinner to celebrate one of Jet’s projects getting wrapped up, and he realized it’d probably be the last time he saw his dad before Christmas. And that would be a _hell_ of a present to drop. This was his chance.

He put it off until they’d finished dinner, finished whatever small talk and coding jokes they could share, until they were in the kitchen cleaning off their dishes and loading them into the dishwasher. He summoned up his courage, and it felt a lot like summoning the necessary subroutines on his disc before he entered uncharted territory in the computer, and then…

He spoke, and mentally cursed himself as his voice shook a little behind the nonchalance he tried to embody. “Oh, dad, there was something I wanted to tell you.”

His dad was crouched down by the dishwasher, sliding his plate in the bottom shelf. “Hm?”

“I’m. I’m bi.”

His dad paused putting his plate in the dishwasher for a moment. Jet couldn’t totally make out his face; it seemed calculating, but not unkind. He recognized it, from years long past but never too distant, as the look he made when he was considering his next words carefully.

Then, he stood up, let out a sigh, and smiled up at Jet, long-grayed hair framing those blue eyes that weren’t unlike Jet’s own.

“That somehow doesn’t come as a surprise.”

Jet laughed softly, trying to be casual, but he looked away as a tension he hadn’t realized he’d been holding was released in his chest. And arms. And his hand, which he hadn’t noticed had been gripping the counter until his knuckles turned white. He managed to exhale, “It doesn’t?”

“No, not really.” Alan walked around the open dishwasher slowly and took Jet’s free hand in his own. “Not when. Well. I don’t think I ever told you, but me and Uncle Flynn, we-”

“I know,” he admitted, with another smile. He couldn’t stop. “Me and Sam figured that out years ago.”

His dad chuckled and squeezed his hand. “Why did I think I could keep anything from you two.”

And that was it, he realized. Years of waiting, years of secrets and closed doors and barely-below-the-surface bouts of shame, and he’d… He’d done it. He’d told his. His dad. That he was bisexual. And it was over as quickly and smoothly as the flu shots he’d held Jet’s hand for when he was little. But instead of a sticker, there was just his dad, smiling and holding his hand, and for the first time in years he seemed genuinely _happy_ with Jet. And there was no virus, analog, digital, or otherwise. Just a lightness in Jet’s chest that he hadn’t felt in ages, and the unfamiliar feeling that he’d made the right decision for the first time in at least as long.

He gave his dad’s hand a squeeze before letting go and ducking to put his own plate in the dishwasher. He was happier than he’d been in about as long as he could remember, and he didn’t want his dad to see the tears in the corners of his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to ask my friends what supportive parents say when their kids come out to write this, and the fact that reading their responses almost made me cry is the entire reason I wrote this. I wanted Jet to have the happy ending that I haven't had (yet).
> 
> There might be some real hurt/comfort added to this in the future if I can ever get my act together. I think these two deserve some real feelings, no?


End file.
